“Not everyone,” Peter said.
Lying on my couch, in 1959, I’m not certain if this actually happened, or if it was all just part of my dream that afternoon. Since I’ve read my sister’s book, my life in the annex has become blurry: what is real, and what was just a story?
When we leave here, we will be married, Peter whispered into my hair in the pitchest black of nights. We will go together, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America. City of Brotherly Love.
Even now I do not really believe that Peter’s words to me were a lie, any more than I thought they were in 1944.
But sometimes I cannot tell what to believe. Sometimes, the only thing I’m sure is real is the thick dark ink on my arm, and that is only because it is permanent, inerasable, unchangeable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
TONIGHT WHEN I GO TO SLEEP, IT IS ONLY ME AND HER IN THE dream. Me and my sister.
We lie there in her room in the annex, writing in our diaries. We are on the bed, our hips and shoulders touching, our elbows moving against each other as we scribble words across our pages. My sister holds her fountain pen to the page, but then stops writing and chews on the end, contemplating, her almond eyes wide.
“What are you thinking?” I ask her.
“I’m not in love with him,” she says. “It isn’t love.”
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“I’m not in love with Joshua,” she says, and then I look at her again, and she is Penny. Penny is sitting there, on the bed, next to me, chewing on the end of the pen, dressed in her frivolous tomato dress.
I awake and sit up startled, sweating. My sister and Penny. They are not the same. I loved my sister. I did.
Though it is only 4 A.M., I know I will not find sleep again tonight. I get out of bed and pull my dog-eared copy of my sister’s book from the shelf. I have marked the page, the one where it is written, where my sister says it, that she doesn’t love him, that she is not in love with him. This is proof, I’ve told myself many times, that anything that might have happened between her and Peter, even later on, that it didn’t actually mean something.
Nothing can’t mean something.
I’m not in love with him. In my head now I imagine her saying this to me. We lay together on the bed, hips touching, arms touching. I jumped a little when she said the words; then I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a moment, remembering the feel of Peter’s hand holding mine.
“Who?” I asked her nonchalantly, pretending as if I didn’t know.
“Peter,” she said, rolling her eyes at me, as if I were such a ninny that I could not even begin to understand the feelings of which she spoke.
“Of course you’re not,” I told her. “You’re too young to be in love.”
She chewed on the end of her fountain pen, thought about it for a moment, and then recorded something in her diary.
But there is so, so much Peter in my sister’s diary. She knew so much about him, how he felt and how he talked, how he moved and how he breathed. What it was like to be there with him, in his room. This much, these details, they are not stories, and I have always told myself that she had to have taken them from me, from my diary, as if it were just a dress from my closet in the Merwedeplein that she was borrowing without even asking.
Because in my diary, I wrote of the way Peter’s eyes looked as they gazed at me on the divan, washing past the moonlight, bluer than the sea. I wrote of the way he held on to me in the middle of the night when I forgot how to breathe, the way I remembered freedom when he spoke my name.
With every single part of my seventeen-year-old body and mind, I loved him. And I detailed all of it in my diary, so our story now, like my diary, it is lost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AT MY DESK, A FEW HOURS LATER, I AM STILL THINKING ABOUT my sister, then about Penny in her tomato dress, saying that she and Joshua, they are not in love. I wonder if Penny really and truly does love Joshua? Or more importantly, does he love her? As his secretary, I know that it is not my place to care, but as his friend, I do not think that Penny is right for him. I feel that sense of emptiness in my belly, the ache I feel every time I think of her and Joshua together, and I swallow hard to try to force it away. He doesn’t love her, I tell myself. He is not in love with her. I cannot see it on his face, a gentle glow, the way I can see it on Shelby’s face.
“Everything all right?” Shelby asks me, interrupting my thoughts. She is leaning across the desks, holding a paper in her hand in a particular way so the fluorescent light catches on her diamond and makes it sparkle. She looks awkward this way, and I think she is doing it just to display the diamond, if only to herself, a constant reminder that what she has wanted for so long, it is suddenly right there, in front of her. I hope that her marriage will be everything she thinks it will be, that Ron really and truly will be devoted to her.
“Yes, fine,” I say. “What about you?” I ask her. “You are engaged to Ron, and you are happy that your spying has given you all the answers you need?”
She shrugs, and holds her hand out to look at the diamond again, and the way she casts her eyes downward, just a little bit, I wonder if there is some doubt still, that it’s possible some of the excitement of the proposal has gently worn away and now there is the reality, which does not shine as bright. “He has asked me to marry him,” she says. “And really, it is everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“But if there is a . . . hussy,” I whisper that last word across the desk. “It would be better to know now than later on.” I do not love him, my sister said. But in my head, I hear the sound of my sister’s giggle echoing from Peter’s room. Shhh. Not everyone knows, he whispered to her.
Shelby shrugs and then says, “Don’t look now, Margie.” She gently yanks her head in the direction of the elevator. “But the queen bee is back.”
I don’t look, though I feel a weight that is a little too heavy in my chest. I do not love him. “Hello, Margie.” The real sound of her voice startles me a little, clearer and higher than it sounded in my dream. I look up and force a smile.
Penny is pink today, the color of the Cadillac. Her dress is more casual than usual and it narrows, like an hourglass, around her small waist, hugging perfectly to her large pointy chest. She has forgone a hat, but her curls are still held back in a suspiciously perfect twist. “Josh is expecting me today,” she says.
“I’ll buzz him,” I say, reaching for the phone.
“No need.” She waves her hand and pushes past my desk, but then she stops and shoots me a look that tells me that she knows that yesterday I was lying to her, and also, it is saying, Do what you will, I am smarter, prettier, more charming . . .
I nod, and she walks past me, into his office.
A few minutes later, Joshua walks out, Penny draped on his arm. He stops for a moment by my desk and tips his hat. “I’m off to lunch, Margie.”
“Okay,” I say.
He smiles at me, and his gray-green eyes—they seem to be laughing, or dancing. They are alive with something, and the way they stare at me, it is like they are telling me a secret. He knows too what I did yesterday, and it amuses him.
“Come on, Josh.” Penny tugs on his arm.
“Back in an hour,” he says to me, tipping his hat again.
“Sometimes, I’d like to punch her smug little face,” Shelby whispers, after the elevator doors have closed.
“Shelby!” I say. But I cannot hold back a small laugh.
“What?” She shrugs. “Don’t tell me you’re not thinking that exact same thing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A FEW DAYS LATER, I AM STILL HAVING TROUBLE SLEEPING, and instead of pacing my apartment or continuing to stare at the ceiling above my bed, I decide to leave for work early. By 8 A.M., I am at my desk, before Shelby and Ezra or even Joshua have arrived for the day.
Just af
ter I sit down in my secretary’s chair, the elevator dings open, and Joshua steps off. Also early. I smile. He wears a navy suit today, with a red-and-navy-striped tie. He holds tight to his attaché, and when he notices me, he smiles his warm Joshua smile.
“Margie,” he says. “Just the person I wanted to see.” He puts his hat on the rack by my desk and waves for me to follow him into his office. “Come,” he says. “Let’s talk.”
I nod, pleased that he has been wanting to see me, and that we are almost alone here. I stand up and walk into his office.
“Shut the door,” he says, “and have a seat.”
I do.
He sits down, folds his hands in front of him, his face serious. For a moment I worry that he might chastise me for lying to Penny the other day, but then he smiles again. “You’re working early today,” he says.
I nod, but I do not tell him the reason, that I have been unable to find sleep, my brain tumbling with thoughts of him and Penny together, the pink Cadillac, Peter. Pim in Switzerland with his new wife. And then, somewhere in the darkest clutches of night, there is my sister, frail and reaching for me at the very end.
Joshua clears his throat. “So I had another idea last night,” he says. I nod again. “Maybe an ad in the paper is too public for some. Maybe we should also approach these people where they feel more comfortable.”
“Okay,” I say, but I am thinking that these people, they do not feel comfortable anywhere. That even your own skin, it is your enemy when it is marked, when you are nothing more, or perhaps nothing less, than a number. Or is that just how I feel? Bryda seems to have no qualms about it.
“Let’s make up some flyers and take them to Beth Shalom,” Joshua is saying.
“Beth Shalom?” I repeat, though I feel as if I am choking on the words, and they refuse to form in my throat into something real.
“Yeah, it’s a synagogue, close to Miss Korzynski’s part of town. A little bit of a poorer area with a lot of immigrants close by. And I’d be willing to bet a lot of the congregation there either work for Robertson or know people who do.” He pauses and runs his hand through his curls. “I’ll draw up the flyers, and then I’ll just need you to take them down there, and speak to the rabbi, sometime before Saturday services. You can take an afternoon this week.”
“Me?” I ask quietly. “You want me to go?”
“I would do it,” he says. “But the rabbi there sometimes plays golf with my father, so I need you to keep this quiet. Don’t even tell the rabbi which law firm you work for, all right?”
“You want me to talk to the rabbi?” I whisper. My throat is turning numb, and so are my fingertips. It is hard to breathe—sometimes this would happen to me in the dark, in the annex. It was so dark there at night that sometimes I imagined that’s what it would be like if we were dead. Just a vast space of nothingness: no sound, no light, no air. The darkness frightened me so much that I would start choking on it, until Peter held on tighter and whispered in my ear, “Just breathe, Margot. Breathe. In and out. It is only air. Babies can do it. The Green Police can do it.”
“Rabbis are just people,” Joshua is saying, shrugging. “Just like the rest of us. No big deal, Margie.” He pauses. “Why don’t you do it tomorrow. Go down there, then take the rest of the afternoon off. You deserve it,” he says. “You’ve been working hard.”
For a long while, after we talk, I stare at the keys on my typewriter, not moving, not typing anything. A rabbi is only a person, Joshua had said.
And a synagogue, it is only a building.
I shake my head. Joshua is wrong; it is not that simple; they are remarkably Jewish things, and thus that makes them different.
It has been almost fifteen years since I have been to a synagogue, and I promised myself I would never go to one again. Even though I sometimes long to go now as my lonely Shabbat candle flickers on my table, my fear, it will not let me.
But I cannot think of a good reason to tell Joshua no, and even in my head, this fear of Beth Shalom, a synagogue to which I have never been, begins to feels silly.
And besides, I remind myself, I am a Gentile now, a secretary. It is not the same. Not the same at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
JUDISCHAUSEN WAS A LARGE TEMPLE IN THE CENTER OF Frankfurt, where I remembered going to Saturday services as a little girl with Mother sometimes. Even after the war, after I came to stay with Eduard in Frankfurt, I could still picture in my mind the way the glass windows rose in an arch, with a blue Star of David stained inside, giving off a particular glow in the light of the morning. In my head, I knew the rest of Frankfurt was not the same, that even some of the houses on Eduard’s Street, Ulme Alle, had been annihilated, as if struck by a wayward tornado. But still, in my mind, Judischausen, it remained untouched.
One Saturday, not too long after Brigitta had left me off at his doorstep, Eduard asked me if there was anywhere I wanted to go, anywhere he could take me. I had already told him that my family, they were all dead. I’d watched his dapper green eyes fall against the light of his fireplace as he’d asked about my mother. “Even Edith?” he’d whispered, a faraway look on his face, so I’d wondered if he was picturing Mother, the way she was once, when she was a girl.
Before we left Frankfurt to move to Holland in 1933, Mother had taken my sister and me with her to say good-bye to Eduard. She’d told me then that he was just an old friend, from her girlhood days. But even as a young girl, I could tell it had been—or was—something more. He’d kissed her good-bye, once, gently on the mouth. “Oh, Edith,” he’d said then, his voice filled with so much sorrow, I was surprised he wasn’t crying. Eduard had loved my mother; this much I was sure of. But I also knew that Eduard was not a Jew, and my mother had been raised as a conservative one. Even before the Nazis, there were some lines that were not crossed.
“I want to go to Judischausen,” I told Eduard that Saturday morning, when he asked.
“Judischausen?” Eduard shook his head. “You do not want to go there.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“It will not be as you remember it,” Eduard said.
“Nothing is,” I told him.
So Eduard drove us slowly through the icy streets leading to the center of Frankfurt, where buildings had crumbled, destroyed by bombs. Frankfurt barely appeared to be a city at all by this point, much less a civilized one. But still, in my head, Judischausen would be the same.
Eduard pulled into a parking space and pointed across the street. “There,” he said. I shook my head. We could not be there yet. I remembered the synagogue had risen high, and I saw nothing but disasters nearby.
I got out of the car and walked, as if inspecting the area more closely would change it. The blue Star of David glass had been blown away, and in its place was a gaping, empty hole, surrounded by the dust of bricks and mortar. One wall was still intact, but it had been painted with the ugliest of symbols, red swastikas. They rose and fell in parallel lines. One was not enough—the Nazis, they had felt the need to cover the wall with dozens of them, as if they were shouting.
I touched my heart, where my yellow star had once rested, sewn into my clothes, then my arm, where then, underneath, my number rested, sewn into my skin.
Judischausen had not just been destroyed by the war, but decimated by it: stripped, shaven, beaten down, tattooed.
I thought about Peter, about what he’d said as I’d lain there in his arms. After the war I’ll no longer be a Jew. I’m done with being a Jew.
“I’m done with being a Jew.” I spoke to Eduard softly, but with certainty.
“But . . . your mother?” he said, and his voice cracked on her name. It was religion that had kept them apart, I was certain of it. And religion that had taken her away.
“My mother is dead,” I said.
Eduard shook his head. “You are who you are. This much you cannot change.”<
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“What is religion,” I asked him, “if it cannot protect you? If it kills you?”
“You are who you are,” Eduard repeated.
I am thinking about that moment now, Thursday afternoon, just before 4 P.M., as I find myself clutching tightly to Joshua’s flyers, standing at the doorway of Beth Shalom. This synagogue is a flat, square cement building and, I am relieved to see, almost unidentifiable as a Jewish place, except for the small green Star of David etched into the front of the wooden door. There are no large stained-glass windows, and maybe that is better. Nothing to shatter, I think as I take a deep breath and pull open the heavy door to walk inside. Every muscle in my body screams at me to turn and run. I do not want to go inside. I do not want to talk to the rabbi, a Jewish man of God. I feel he might look at me, maybe the way Bryda has looked, and call me a snake. It is so much easier to hide, to slip inside a second skin, so you can simply avoid anything that falls around the first skin.
But I cannot see a way around this, and I am already here. I will simply drop the flyers off, I tell myself, and then I will run. I will travel back on the bus that took me here, back to Market Street, back to my apartment and Katze. I will run, and then I will forget again. Forgetting is easy. It is almost as easy as hiding, or keeping secrets.
Inside the synagogue it is dark and smells faintly of rainwater and mildew. I follow the signs to the rabbi’s office, which appears to be just off the main room, and I swallow hard to try to keep myself from gagging. I keep my eyes straight ahead, not allowing myself to look inside the main room.
I knock quietly on the office door, hoping that the rabbi won’t be in, that I’ll just be able to leave the flyers by the door, and run. Run.
But quickly I hear a response to my knock. “Come in,” a man’s voice says.
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